Reddit Pushes Google for More from Their AI Deal
It could force AI giants to pay not just for Reddit’s data, but to keep its communities alive.
About a year and a half ago, Reddit signed a licensing deal with Google, reportedly worth around $60 million a year, to let Google feed Reddit posts into its AI models. Now, according to Bloomberg, Reddit’s back at the table. And this time, it wants a bigger role inside Google’s AI universe.
The pitch is simple: Google search and AI Overviews already surface Reddit answers to millions of people. The problem? Those people grab the info and bounce. Reddit’s execs want Google to actually send users back to the site—to post, upvote, and keep generating the content Google’s models rely on. If Google’s going to mine the gold, Reddit wants it to keep the mine alive.
Money is also on the table. Reddit is floating the idea of dynamic pricing for data: AI companies will pay more if their models rely heavily on certain posts or communities. If a subreddit becomes the backbone of a chatbot’s answer, the value of that data should go up.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
Reddit feels like it has leverage here. In an internet drowning in SEO spam and AI slop, Reddit stands out as one of the last places where real people talk like… not bots. Posts are grouped by topic, ranked by actual human votes, and often more useful than the top links on Google.
That’s why “just add ‘reddit’ to your search” became a hack. And the numbers back it up as Reddit is now the most-cited domain in tools like Perplexity and Google’s own AI Overviews.
But here’s the paradox: the same AI tools that make Reddit valuable also threaten its survival. If users get answers without ever clicking through, traffic drops. And without traffic, the conversations that make Reddit worth training on dry up. So, these new negotiations boil down to a blunt message: if AI companies want the good stuff, they’ll need to help Reddit stick around long enough to keep making it.
Louis Eriakha
